Bush vs. the Beltway: The Inside Battle Over War in Iraq

Laurie Mylroie

In loving memory of my grandparents Victor and Erna Koerner Knopf, who found a new home in America, and to the family members who died in the Holocaust:

Anna Koerner; Dezoe and Margaret Koerner Eisner and their children, Erninko and Magda; Emile Koerner; Rose Koerner Klein and her children, Hilda and Rudy; and Rudolph Spoiler along with his son Maxie

Woe unto those who call evil good and good evil, who turn darkness into light and light into darkness.

—Isaiah 5:20

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION

Chapter One: THE ANTHRAX PROBE

Chapter Two: DECEPTION AND SELF-DECEPTION

Chapter Three: BUREAUCRATINZING THE INTELLIGENCE

Chapter Four: THE NEW REGIME IN IRAQ

Chapter Five: THE 1990S PEACE PROCESS AND THE UNDERLYING STRATEGIC MISCONCEPTION

Chapter Six: THE BATTLE OF THE BELTWAY

Chapter Seven: KNOW THE ENEMY

Chapter Eight: WAS OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM LEGAL?

CONCLUSION

Notes

INDEX

AFTERWORD

ALSO BY LAURIE MYLROIE

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

INTRODUCTION

IF IT IS TRUE that generals have a tendency to fight the last war, so too do antiwar protesters. While there was certainly room for serious debate about the wisdom of engaging in war with Iraq, many observers were struck by the incongruity of some of the positions taken in opposition to the war. On the one hand there was the frightening, if unfounded, image of indiscriminate U.S. bombing causing thousands (or even hundreds of thousands) of civilian deaths; on the other hand it was rarely acknowledged that the existing state of peace already entailed very real civilian suffering, without any hope of relief, as well as a substantial (and widely resented) U.S. military presence in the Persian Gulf region that could not be withdrawn until the threat had been eliminated.

Most striking, however, was the easy dismissal, on the part of many commentators as well as protesters, of the idea that U.S. policy-makers might have serious concerns about an Iraqi threat, either imminent or long-term. President George W. Bush’s commitment to disarming Iraq was seen as reflecting (pick one): his cowboy mentality; or his ties to big oil; or the pernicious influence of his hawkish neoconservative advisers. The war against Iraq was treated as a distraction from the war on terrorism, rather than as a key element of it.

Dismissing the Threat

SOME OF THE criticisms had the quality of wishful thinking. The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace assured us that we needn’t fear biological or chemical terrorism because Saddam could be counted on not to share his crown jewels—his weapons of mass destruction—with terrorist agents. Along the same lines, others held that he would unleash such weapons only if he faced certain military defeat.

It is hard to imagine any president staking the security of American cities on reasoning of this sort. For President Bush, the first duty of the office was to protect the country’s security. He certainly did not have the option of ignoring the strategic landscape: Saddam Hussein’s project included his unrelenting push to develop and conceal weapons of mass destruction; his use of chemical warfare during the 1980s; his successful drive to end weapons inspections in the 1990s; his blatantly imperialist aspirations, invading first Iran and then Kuwait and threatening Saudi Arabia too (not to mention raining thirty-nine missiles down on Israel); and his avowed hostility to the United States throughout the period since the 1991 Gulf War.

Nor could any policy-maker, particularly after September 11, 2001, disregard the possibility of innovative, nonmilitary methods of delivery of chemical or biological weapons—botulism, smallpox, or deadly nerve agents such as sarin, mustard gas, or VX. Anthrax, after all, had arrived through the mail, and passenger planes had become deadly missiles.

This seems an obvious enough point, so obvious that it’s difficult to understand why so many commentators not only dismissed such concerns, but also could not fathom that anyone actually took them seriously.

The Party Is So Over

IT’S HARD TO RECALL just how giddy and dizzying the 1990s were. We had won the 1991 Gulf War handily, finally laying to rest (it seemed) the ghost of Vietnam. The Soviet Union, our great antagonist, suddenly collapsed from its own inner weakness. Bill Clinton ran—and won—on the slogan It’s the economy, stupid, and the longest period of sustained economic growth in U.S. history followed. America had peace and prosperity.

Both the peace and the prosperity contained elements of illusion, we now recognize. The security bubble burst in one day, with the attacks of September 11, 2001. The economic bubble was already deflating, more gradually. The stock market decline, which began in 1999, deepened over the next year and a half; the dramatic rebound of the second half of 2001 turned to a full rout at the beginning of 2002, no doubt exacerbated by the economic fallout from the terrorist attacks. The bankruptcies of such established companies as Enron and WorldCom introduced the term creative accounting into the American lexicon and shook our faith in U.S. business leadership, as did the evidence that a number of prestigious Wall Street brokerage firms had been flogging overvalued shares of the corporations they brokered, making hefty commissions at the expense of their credulous clients.

The illusory peace bubble had something in common with this inflated impression of prosperity. As we’ll see in chapter 6, many of the members of U.S. government foreign policy agencies—the bureaucracies-tend to serve interests as narrowly defined as those of the Wall Street brokerage firms. The interests of the public must be championed by elected officials, since such interests rarely register on the radar screens of unelected bureaucrats.

Where Were the Checks?

IN SOME WAYS, America’s Founding Fathers held a rather pessimistic view of human nature. Because they believed that power was bound to be abused, they established a system of government in which power is fractured, in a set of opposing forces we know as checks and balances. It is no great surprise to learn that some individuals or agencies in Washington have been prone to behavior comparable to Wall Street’s sins of commission—and that such behavior can have an impact on the public interest and on national security. Ironically, though, individuals in the private sector are far more likely than those in government to be held to account for egregiously inappropriate behavior, even though the consequences of government officials’ actions can be much more damaging.

Everyone must do what he must do for his career, I was told by a highly regarded Middle East expert back in 1998. The times are very cynical, he claimed, and so behavior that was very self-serving became acceptable, irrespective of its possible implications for the country’s security. Like most of his colleagues at the time, he evidently shared the mentality of the now-disgraced Wall Street firms. And the cynically constructed policy analysis offered by most of the Iraq experts during the 1990s directly reflected the entrenched cynicism of the bureaucracies, which is where the greatest problem lay.

The Decision for War

THE DECISION FOR WAR with Iraq was made soon after the September 11 attacks, far above the bureaucratic level.¹ On the afternoon of September 11, with the Pentagon still burning and rescue workers still engaged in the grim task of pulling bodies from the rubble, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld—who himself could have been among the casualties had the hijacked plane hit another part of the building-ordered the Defense Department’s intelligence agencies to search for evidence that Baghdad, as well as al Qaeda, was linked to the attacks. Rumsfeld also ordered the military to start working on plans for striking Iraq.² Critics of the war, both in and outside government, have suggested that Rumsfeld and others in the Pentagon, as well as in the vice president’s office, used the September 11 attacks as a vehicle to promote a prior, unrelated project: overthrowing Saddam. But this suggestion reflects a fundamental misunderstanding. What these critics had no way of knowing was that the Pentagon had just completed a review of counterterrorism policy, and Rumsfeld already had some reason to suspect that Iraq may have been involved.³

On September 17, 3001, following a weekend meeting with his senior advisers at Camp David, Bush told a National Security Council meeting, I believe Iraq was involved, but I’m not going to strike them now. I don’t have the evidence at this point. Bush had already decided to target Osama bin Laden, al Qaeda, and the Taliban, but he also told the Pentagon to keep working on plans for attacking Iraq, and he signed off on the outline of a war plan that included Iraq.⁴

In early 2002, as the war in Afghanistan was winding down, Bush directed the CIA to begin a major, covert program to topple Saddam. Expectations were low—yet even if it did not succeed, it would help prepare the way for military action, as the agency identified targets and intensified its intelligence gathering.

On January 28, during his State of the Union speech, Bush denounced the Axis of Evil, putting Iraq at the top of the list. It was Bush’s first public indication that Iraq could be the next target in the war on terrorism

On April 4, 2002, Bush told a British television journalist, I made up my mind that Hussein needs to go. Pressed for further detail, Bush would only say, The policy of my government is that he goes.⁵ Bush also told National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice that it was time to figure out what we are doing about Iraq.⁶ Serious military planning began around the same time.

Nonetheless, three months later, in July, Richard Haass, director of policy planning in the State Department, suggested to Rice that they should discuss the pros and cons of confronting Iraq. Rice replied that there was no point; the president had already decided.⁷ Critics within the bureaucracies would later complain that they did not learn of the decision until it had already been made.

This book is, from one point of view, the story of Bush’s battle with the bureaucracies of the U. S. government, particularly the CIA and the State Department.

While the September 11 strikes changed everything for Bush— imposing the inescapable responsibility to prevent a future recurrence—they had no comparable impact on the bureaucracies. Within these bodies, individual responsibilities are often very narrowly defined, and there is great sensitivity to so-called political constraints. To show any serious concern for the larger policy implications of one’s limited task is generally considered naive: the sophisticates avoid thinking above their pay grade.

There was a general inability within the bureaucracies to comprehend the danger that the president recognized after September 11. In fact, to have recognized the problem would have been tantamount to acknowledging that the existing policy analyses, supplied by the same agencies, had left the country exposed to a great danger.

Specifically, these agencies had rationalized away the threat of bioterrorism and related terrors. Stunning revelations had emerged in 1995 about Iraq’s ongoing weapons programs—biological, chemical, and nuclear—from evidence provided by the Iraqi regime after Saddam’s son-in-law Hussein Kamil (who had actually supervised those programs) defected to Jordan. Not only many public commentators, but also much of the national security bureaucracy itself maintained that Saddam would not use those weapons, or commit other major acts of aggression against the United States, because (they claimed) he was a rational actor, interested above all in his own survival, and because the threat he feared above all others was retaliation by the United States.

This view represented the position held by the CIA and the State Department during the Clinton administration: Saddam was in his box. That assessment had in fact changed very little in 2002 and 2003, even as the United States prepared for war. In October 2002, the consensus among CIA analysts was still that Saddam was unlikely to commit acts of terrorism—whether using weapons of mass destruction or even conventional attacks, under the current circumstances. The one situation in which Saddam’s calculations were likely to change, according to these analysts, would be if the United States went to war to depose him. Then, they argued, the chances were very high that he would strike back in a ferocious way.⁸

Why, then, did President Bush make the apparently risk-laden decision to go to war? Why not let a sleeping dog lie? The danger was indeed acute that Saddam would lash out with an unconventional terrorist attack as the United States took him down, and the United States was extremely fortunate that nothing of the sort occurred. That Bush had apparently steeled himself to incur that risk underscores that he not only understood something the CIA analysts did not, but that he also accepted a burden of responsibility that they were unwilling to share.

A Fatally Flawed Concept

THIS BOOK IS ALSO the story of a massive intelligence failure that occurred in the 1990s. In that comfortable decade, given America’s demonstrated power and might, it was presumed that no rational actor would challenge us. What existed, to borrow a phrase from Clinton’s National Security Council Adviser, Anthony Lake, were a handful of backlash states, a small group of rogues including Iraq and North Korea, which had not decided to get with the program. These were not major states, however, and their numbers were small—and so it was assumed, conveniently, that their ability to cause serious harm was limited.

If major dangers existed, we were told, they were more likely to come from nonstate actors, particularly religious extremists such as Osama bin Laden. They alone did not march to the drum of reason. To begin with, they were fanatics, with followers ready to die in pursuit of their hatreds. And they appeared to enjoy a unique exemption from the constraint of deterrence: they could act against the United States without fear of massive, focused retaliation. The war in Afghanistan in fact demonstrated that this was not really so, and that even bin Laden and al Qaeda had a territorial base that could be denied to them by military action.

There was also a far more serious flaw in this general assessment. The implicit syllogism ran as follows: a terrorist attack by a state against the United States would invite retaliation; to invite retaliation is irrational; states are (now) rational; therefore no state would engage in terrorism against the United States. What this logic failed to acknowledge was the possibility that a state (such as Iraq) might attempt to evade deterrence by evading detection—that is, by concealing its activities behind one of these irrational nonstate actors. In that case, a state might well take the risk of committing an assault—even a massive assault—on the United States.

Clearly, any such attempt at concealing terrorist activity and evading detection would represent a direct challenge to U.S. intelligence capabilities. The assertion, often repeated over the past year, that Iraq had been successfully contained reflected a confidence in our intelligence capabilities—as well as a certainty that no significant third-party terrorist activity could be successfully concealed—that is not justified by the facts, as we shall see in later chapters.

Similarly, the sustained diplomatic effort called the Middle East Peace Process, which began with the 1993 Oslo accords, was premised on the conviction that rational actors like Hafiz al Assad and Yasser Arafat must recognize that, with the loss of the Soviet Union (their superpower patron), they had no choice but to make peace with Israel, given its close ties with the world’s sole remaining superpower. The only actors who would not recognize this new reality and accommodate themselves to it were the more marginal (and irrational) players—the Islamic militants, the enemies of peace.

Events would prove, however, that this distinction was not quite so sharp or clear. Arafat could, and did, work with the Islamic organization Hamas, at least on a tactical level; and elements of the PLO, like the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, certainly had Islamic leanings. Syria, moreover, served as the base for the Palestinian Islamic Jihad and also supported Hizbollah, the Shi’a militant organization in Lebanon. And neither Arafat nor Assad ever made peace, despite the increasingly generous territorial concessions offered by Israel in this period. There was little reason to believe Saddam Hussein would hesitate to play the same game of using proxies for his terrorist aims.

Confronting a Grave Threat

AMERICANS GENERALLY did not understand the peril that developed during the 1990s, and which only grew more acute as we went to war in Afghanistan and then in Iraq. In part, this was because of the Bush administration’s efforts to avoid causing panic by revealing in detail Iraq’s potential for terror. But the president did explain the threat in general terms in early March 2003, on the eve of war:

Saddam Hussein has a long history of reckless aggression and terrible crimes. He possesses weapons of terror. He provides funding and training and safe haven to terrorists, terrorists who would willingly use weapons of mass destruction against America, and other peace-loving countries….

I think the threat is real, and so do a lot of other people in my government. And since I believe the threat is real, and since my most important job is to protect the security of the American people, that’s precisely what we will do.⁹

Bush was not the first president to recognize the unique threat to the country posed by Iraq’s potential for covert use of unconventional weapons. Bill Clinton had spoken of it in 1998:

Think how many can be killed by just a tiny bit of anthrax, and think about how it’s not just that Saddam Hussein might put it on a Scud missile, an anthrax head, and send it on to some city he wants to destroy. Think about all the other terrorists and other bad actors who could just parade through Baghdad and pick up their stores if we don’t take action.¹⁰

Clinton, however, did not take action. And in the absence of presidential leadership, nothing would be done to address the danger. It would require a determined presidential commitment to overcome the inertia, narrow agendas, and mutual mistrust of the bureaucracies.

No Choice but War

GEORGE W. BUSH was absolutely right: there was no choice but war. The danger was enormous. Not only was there the possibility of more large and undefendable attacks on the order of September 11; the possibility of unconventional terrorism, and particularly biological terrorism, was very real. That was suggested not only by the anthrax letters that followed the September 11 attacks, but also by an evident (and alarming) interest in crop dusters on the part of some hijackers and their unidentified companions.

Warfare often involves deception; history is filled with stunning and successful ruses. The failure of the bureaucracies to consider, let alone investigate, the possibility that deception was involved in the September 11 attacks (as well as previous terrorist assaults) reveals these agencies’ limitations in understanding and assessing not only the threat posed by Iraq, but potential future threats as well.

Immediately after the September 11 strikes, there was widespread public speculation about Iraq’s involvement. The appearance of the anthrax letters a few weeks later certainly fueled that speculation. But in late 2001, with the United States still engaged in Afghanistan, unattributed leaks began to appear in the media designed to systematically discredit any information that might suggest an Iraqi link to al Qaeda or terrorism. The leaks continued to flow in the spring of 2002 and reached a crescendo in the fall, as the administration began to make its case for war.

In fact, substantial evidence did exist to tie Iraq to al Qaeda, and to suggest that Iraq was involved in the September 11 attacks. That evidence, along with the bureaucratic campaign to undercut it, is crucial to understanding both the war itself and the challenges posed in the post-Saddam era.

The International Context

THE QUESTION OF TERRORISM was not the only Iraq-related issue contested by the hidebound American bureaucracy. There was also the problem of how to overthrow Saddam and what would replace him. As long ago as 1991, the CIA had been persuaded (possibly because of Iraqi disinformation) that Saddam would be overthrown in a military coup; when the Gulf War brought on massive popular uprisings against Saddam, the first President Bush was advised to allow Saddam to suppress them—on the perverse, and tragically misguided, argument that this would spark an internal coup. Twelve years later, the CIA was still dealing with the same Iraqi exiles who had promised, and failed, to deliver such a coup. Similarly, the State Department generally looked to Iraq’s old guard—the Ba’athists—to provide the basis for a new regime, despite the president’s stated objective of establishing a democratic government in Iraq.

The ability of any president to impose his policies on the bureaucracies of his government is far more constrained than we tend to think. The bureaucracies tend to see themselves as a permanent government: presidents and their cabinets, after all, come and go. And they have their own indirect ways of imposing constraints, working with selected allies in the think tanks and media to fight their perennial Beltway battles.

Among the more astonishing bureaucratic feats in this regard is the successful suppression of substantial information that could tie Iraq to at least two major acts of terrorism against the United States: the 1993 bombing of New York’s World Trade Center, masterminded by the individual known as Ramzi Yousef; and the audacious 1995 plot—mercifully derailed—to bomb a dozen U.S. passenger aircraft, in which Yousef participated along with Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, the man who would go on to mastermind the September 11 attacks six years later.

Indeed, over the course of the post-9/11 investigation into al Qaeda, an odd picture emerged. Mohammed is said to be Yousef’s uncle; two of Yousef’s brothers are high-ranking al Qaeda figures, as is one of his cousins.¹¹ Moreover, one of Yousef’s childhood friends was arrested, along with Yousef, in the unsuccessful plot to bomb U.S. airplanes. Thus, the claim of U.S. investigators is now essentially that one family—Yousef, his uncle, two brothers, a cousin, and a childhood friend-constitute the core of the astonishingly ambitious and lethal Islamic terrorism that has targeted the United States over the past decade.

This is an intriguing scenario, worthy of a spy thriller, and we naturally want to know more about these people and where they come from. Ever since the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, I’ve followed the case as best I could—turning for guidance to Jim Fox, who headed the New York FBI and directed the investigation in New York at that time. We generally shared the same view of that attack, including a fascination with the problem of Ramzi Yousef.

Who was this mysterious figure who had entered late into the plot and transformed it from a routine terrorist bomb scare to a staggeringly ambitious plan to bring down the Twin Towers (a goal it did not, of course, achieve)? Much of the information about his purported identity did not add up (as we’ll see in chapter 7), and he seemed to come from a different world than the militant Islamists with whom he was associated.

The discovery of the 1995 airplane plot revealed that there was in fact another distinct, and very lethal, terrorist network that appeared to center on Yousef, confirming our view of the importance of this man’s identity. The Washington bureaucracies had not simply dropped the ball; in effect, they had chosen to kneel on the ball and run out the half.

There is another odd point. All these individuals are said to be Pakistanis, born and raised in Kuwait (save perhaps the cousin, who may have grown up elsewhere). The little we really know about their identities is based on files in Kuwait that predate Kuwait’s liberation. Yet because Iraq occupied Kuwait for nearly seven months, the reliability of those files is open to serious suspicion. Iraqi intelligence had ample time to tamper with them.

It is more than likely that the Kuwaiti records on which the identities of these terrorist masterminds are based belonged to individuals who died (possibly during the Iraqi occupation). The files would then have been doctored to create false identities—legends, as they’re called in intelligence circles—for the Pakistani terrorists, as we shall discuss. The alternative hypothesis is that a single family was the moving force behind the most lethal and sophisticated terrorist campaign ever waged. No known terrorist organization has a family at its core; such a claim is without precedent.

And Iraqi intelligence, of course, is the only party that reasonably could have tampered with those files—during Iraq’s occupation of Kuwait. To demonstrate that these Pakistani terrorists are not the individuals they claim to be—and that the Kuwaiti files were tampered with—would thus be tantamount to demonstrating Iraq’s sponsorship of their terrorism.

That demonstration is most easily carried out with the individuals in custody, such as Yousef himself, who was arrested in February 1995. Yousef’s identity is indeed based on a corrupted Kuwaiti file. The same is probably true of Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, who was arrested in March 2003. Demonstrating that Mohammed is not who he claims to be, and that a file in Kuwait was tampered with to create his legend would establish a direct connection between Iraq and the September 11 attacks, as chapter 7 explains.

Finally, chapter 8 addresses the issue of the war’s legality, among the most misunderstood dimensions of the war. I am indebted to Professor Robert F. Turner, cofounder of the Center for National Security Law at the University of Virginia, for a cogent and comprehensive analysis of the case in international law. As he makes clear, there are three distinct principles that can be invoked to argue the legality of the action. Principle number one, factually supported by the broad line of argument of this book, is the right of states to self-defense. Principle number two is the narrower (and less conclusive) legal argument that Iraq’s repeated violations of the terms of the cease-fire resolution (which were the subject of repeated warnings by the Security Council) in effect vitiated the resolution. Principle number three, equally strong as the case for self-defense, is the argument that gross violations of human rights (themselves the subject of United Nations condemnation) by their very nature give other states the right to intervene.

In the public debate going into the war, it was sometimes argued that the administration’s invocation of humanitarian grounds somehow detracted from the persuasiveness of